Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class. “I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.” The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with 79 pounds (about $105) to spare. She has been reanimated with the help of academic researchers – who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews – and a “digital prosthetic” made with AI and then fitted over a real actor’s performance.“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” said Michael Levine of BBC Maestro. “This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.” It coincides with a debate about the ethics of AI. In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train AI models without consent. However, Christie’s family is fully on board. “We just had the red line it had to be her words,” said James Prichard, her great-grandson and chief executive of Agatha Christie Ltd. “And the image and the voice had to be like her.” Christie is hardly the only person to have been resurrected. In 2021, AI was used to generate Anthony Bourdain‘s voice reading out his own words. For Christie, AI was used to create her likeness, not to build the course or write the script. That’s part of why Levine rejects the idea this is a deepfake. Prichard said his family would never have agreed to a project that invented Christie’s views. “We’re not speaking for her,” he said. “We didn’t make anything up in terms of things like her suggestions and what she did,” said Mark Aldridge, who led the team. That, for Carissa Veliz, a professor of philosophy is still “extremely problematic”. Even if her family consented, Christie hasn’t. “She’s not sitting there. And therefore, it’s a deepfake.” “When you see someone who looks and talks like Christie, it’s easy for boundaries to be blurred.” But Felix M Simon of Reuters Institute at Oxford University, said this Christie was meant to entertain and also educate – which the author did when she was alive. Perhaps this sort of fact-fiction-futurism melange is just the way things are going in an age when AI can be used to finish sentences, replace jobs and, perhaps, even try to resurrect the dead.Either way, the creators think Christie would have liked it. “Can we definitively know this something she would be approving of?” said Levine. “We hope. But we don’t definitively know, because she’s not here.”
